Everything that concerns requesting also evokes something analogous to
a mechanism. Every desire of a pure good, starting from a certain degree
of intensity, makes the corresponding good descend. If the effect does
not occur, the desire is not real, or too weak, or the desired good imperfect,
or it is mixed with evil. When the conditions are filled, God never refuses.

If we exercise a kind of constraint on God, it can only be a matter of
a mechanism instituted by God. Supernatural mechanisms are at least as
rigorous as falling bodies; but natural mechanisms are the conditions
for the creation of events as such, without any regard to value; and supernatural
mechanisms are the conditions for the creation of pure good as such.

The problem of miracles
creates a difficulty between religion and science only because it is badly
posed. In order to pose it well, the miracle must be defined. By saying
that it is something contrary to the laws of nature, one says something
that is absolutely meaningless. We do not know the laws of nature. We can
only make suppositions about them. If the suppositions we make are contradicted
by the facts, then it is because our supposition is at least partially in
error. To say that a miracle is the effect of a particular volition of God
is no less absurd. Among the events that happen, we have no reason to affirm
that certain ones proceed more from God's will than others. We only know,
in a general manner, that everything that happens, without exception, conforms
to God's will as Creator; and that all that contains at least a parcel of
pure good proceeds from the supernatural inspiration of God as absolute
good. But when a saint makes a miracle, what's good is his sainthood, not
the miracle.

It is in no way contrary to the laws of nature that there be a correspondence
between a total abandonment of the soul to good or evil, and some physical
phenomena that only occur in that case. It would be against the laws of
nature that it be otherwise. For to each state of the human soul there
corresponds something physical. To sadness corresponds salty water in
the eyes; why could there not be in certain states of mystical ectstasy,
as is said, a certain lifting of the body above the ground? Whether or
not this is the case matters not. What is certain is that, if mystical
ecstasy is something real in the soul, there must correspond to it, in
the body, phenomena that do not occur when the soul is in another state.
The link between mystical ecstasy and these phenomena is constituted by
a mechanism analogous to that which links sadness and tears. We know nothing
about the first mechanism. We don't know any more about the second.